Current approaches to production line monitoring during semiconductor device manufacture is based on two approaches. Production line monitoring is often carried out by monitoring defect counts on wafers using statistical process control (SPC) charts to uncover excursions. A second approach includes the manual review of a random sample of 100-200 defects with subsequent renormalization of defect counts per defect type. This is carried out to monitor the population of critical defects on the wafer and to uncover any new defect that may show up in the process. Typical approaches do not allow operators to monitor failure rates in relation to design patterns and fail to effectively tie defectivity to systematic device design and/or integration issues. Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a system and method that cures the shortcomings of current systems as identified above.